Light-gun games have rarely garnered much respect in the gaming community, which is due in part to their relatively shallow gameplay and the gimmicky nature of the light gun. Namco managed to break this trend with the Time Crisis games, which brought more depth than most other light-gun games, along with an almost tangible frantic action feeling. The PlayStation saw a port of the original Time Crisis, and Namco has now developed a PlayStation-exclusive Time Crisis game called Project Titan.
Your character's motivation is fairly straightforward, if not slightly irrelevant. You play as Richard Miller, the black-leather-jacket-clad secret agent from the first Time Crisis game, and you've been framed for the assassination of Xavier Serano, president of the fictional, assumedly Caribbean island country of Caruba. Your employers have a certain level of faith in you and give you 48 hours to clear your name before they turn you over to the Caruban authorities. Further plot details, mostly concerning spies, espionage, and double-crossing villains, are revealed courtesy of real-time cutscenes throughout the rest of the game, but they serve as little more than window dressing.
The meat of Time Crisis has been and remains the game's unique gameplay system. Whereas most modern light-gun games have you shoot offscreen to reload your weapon, Time Crisis instead has you press the button on the side of the GunCon to duck behind something and reload, as well as to avoid shots being fired at you. But there is a clock running the entire time, and it's game over if time runs out, so this gives you incentive to shoot fast and to make your shots count. In the arcade, Time Crisis games are equipped with a foot pedal for ducking, which keeps both your hands free to aim. Using the button on the barrel of the GunCon can quickly wear out your arms, as well as inhibit your accuracy. Aside from giving you the ability to duck, Project Titan is on rails like any other shooter, moving you from one scenario to another, all the while shooting at about a dozen subsets of bad-guy clones while they try to shoot you.
Project Titan departs from the standard Time Crisis gameplay during boss fights by letting you move to several different fixed locations during the fight. When you duck, yellow arrows will appear in the direction you're able to move. Shoot the arrow, and you'll move to that position. It is an interesting gameplay addition and makes the boss fights more about pattern recognition than sharp shooting. Another PlayStation-exclusive feature is the shot combo system, which rewards you with lives for shooting a number of villains without missing.
